Looking for a cool data set to play with? Interested in seeing how you can visualize the growth and spread of scientific knowledge? In the past year, the Initiative for Open Citation has made over 500 million references openly available, with no copyright restrictions.

Wikipedia has 297 language editions, and as of March 1, 2018 over 15 million records. Wikimedia staff have published the data set and begun to analyze it. You can learn more about the sets, and answer burning questions like, “What’s the top cited item in Wikipedia?”

It’s not easy being a Wikipedia contributor; sometimes edits and re-edits can result in “edit wars”, often over what can appear to an outsider as a trivial matter. The edits and re-edits are tracked and form a data set. That is how David McCandless made this dynamic infographic. He regularly creates and features funny or inspiring graphics from different data sets, and posts them on his website Information is Beautiful. The Library also has his book by the same name.